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Onion Sauce (Peel and boil until tender)
Peel and boil until tender four large onions. Drain and chop them very fine; add a cup of new milk, a small lump of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Heat, but do not boil, and serve.
A plain boiled-onion sauce of the sort meant to go alongside roast mutton, boiled fowl or tripe. It is barely thickened, so the two things that matter are cooking the onions long enough and keeping the milk below a simmer.
- The hinge: do not boilOnce the milk goes in, hold the pan at a bare steam. Milk left to boil catches on the bottom of the pan and can go grainy.
- "New milk"Milk fresh from the cow, whole and unhomogenised. Whole milk is the nearest thing; half milk and half single cream will give a richer sauce.
- "A small lump of butter"Read it as about 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. More is not wrong, and the extra fat helps carry the sauce.
- Boiling the onionsFour large onions want 25 to 35 minutes at a steady simmer in salted water, until a knife meets no resistance at the centre. Underdone onions stay sharp and the finished sauce tastes raw.
- Draining mattersPress the drained onions in a sieve before chopping. Water clinging to them is the main reason this sauce turns out thin and pallid.
- If you want it thickerThe original is deliberately loose. Some period books give a version bound with flour worked into the butter, which is worth doing if it is to sit on a plate rather than pool around the meat.
- YieldRoughly 2 to 3 cups, enough for about six servings alongside a roast.
Onion sauce is a long-standing fixture of British and Anglo-American cookery, and by the nineteenth century it was firmly attached to roast mutton and boiled rabbit. The milk-and-butter form here is a plain, mild version. Household compilations of this period expected home cooks to dress plain boiled and roasted meats themselves, and a sauce built from four onions, a cup of milk and a lump of butter cost almost nothing.